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This is FUCKING INSANE!!!!!

My inner child is screaming with joy right now not even kidding, when I was a kid I was kind of a nerd (and still am :P) and knew about PhysX too from e.g Mirror's Edge and I had always imagined the pure orgasm that would be running this game using PhysX and FUCK ME IF THAT ISN'T TRUE, why have games diverged so much from this??????

Even just looking at like a building collapsing with all the rubble under it bouncing off and then forming a proper pile of debris (THAT YOU CAN INTERACT WITH) is so much fun and adds another layer to the already amazingly fun game.

Mind you, all these clips and screenshots are taken WITHOUT ANY DEBRIS DISAPPEARING, all debris that the game generates are kept and simulated. And remain active/wakeable after going to sleep.

For these patches I've started creating an automated test system that records my movements and then replays them in the same way so the AI can test much much faster than I would be able to.

There are a few issues I still haven't managed to iron out in the packaged release:

• Sometimes pieces wake up and explode, doesn't happen too often and only with recently sleepy piles

• Some pieces freeze in the air and don't wake up anymore, smaller thinner pieces seems like

• Rockets don't seem to hit the debris and instead go under them (then upon exploding the debris do react though, so cool :D)

• Performance, not really an issue/bug but from what the AI said and from what I've seen it do there's still a few low hanging fruits, see below for more details

• A few pieces could fall under the floor sometimes, AI says it's a few percent so I am still not worried about it

• Debris clusters (the ones that break up again if you shoot at them) seem to wake up when you get near them and explode/move around, almost always

• Pickaxe doesn't seem to work as well as in the original game, it's harder to break walls, doable but harder

Performance: the physics side is pretty much not the bottleneck anymore and instead sleeps pretty much once stuff settles in, but rendering is a 'problem' now; I quoted it because rendering something like 40.000 sleeping debri pieces at 60hz wouldn't really count as a problem in my book, but from what I've seen and the AI said we can do probably at lot more in this department.

From what I've seen I only saw performance drop significantly when looking at fully frozen/sleeping piles on the ground; the AI looked around in the binary and noticed right now the CPU is the one that is working on the rendering side, doing all kinds of visibility checks for each single debri; my idea is to instead merge frozen rubbles into one single mesh and do a single visibility check; then when something wakes the pile up it goes back to normal debris.

Another thing I still haven't addressed and could address later is that in the campaign when you go far enough from a spot and enter another 'cell' the old debris disappear; I could technically implement a system that e.g dumps the debris to disk to free up RAM and reinstates them when going back (just as an example, there might be better ways to do this) but since there are a lot of moving pieces already I preferred releasing it like it is now and will add other pieces later if people try it out and it turns stable enough. One thing that worries me is that I have very powerful hardware and instead on weaker hardware it won't work or will work very badly (I don't have other hardware ready to test this on), but let's see.

All in all to reach this point Opus took like 3 days straight developing and automatically testing. That is not that long, see below.

By the way, kind of off topic, but I spent most of the weekend in a kinda shook state, because over the span of these weeks I started properly experimenting SOTA AI at the 'pro' level (the one where you shell a lot of money for it), and the thing is that I went in asking for more and more, day in and day out, and at the beginning it was so cool, but after a while, I started having kind of a sinking feeling in my chest, it got more scary than not at a point. Mind you, this is insanely cool and I love that AI this good exists, but I don't think people have realized quite how powerful this is. I can ask for anything, and so far at least, even very, VERY complex stuff, so far Opus has been able to do it given enough time (and even not that much really). We are starting to see it publicly with the PhotoCraft/Adobe clean room recreation, Office recreation stuff and the sheer amount of recomps coming out etc and I think we are kinda on the edge of a cliff because this could start hurting the 'right' people and we all get to get the short end of the stick, hopefully not.